We all experience our feelings shifting — throughout the day and across periods of our lives. For some of us, this doesn’t change much, while others may feel totally different from one day to the next. To better understand how our feelings work and change, psychologists map them along two dimensions: “valence” and “arousal.” Valence captures how pleasant you feel, and arousal marks how activated you feel. Together, valence and arousal are termed “affect.”
This project documents how six individuals ‘move’ through affective space over a two-week period, or, their ‘affective trajectories.’ By animating daily reported feelings, we can explore where in affective space each person spends the most time across the sampling period. We can also see what emotion words a person uses to describe their feelings at each location by hovering over the dots.